January's Adventures

So, 2014 started standing on a hill over looking Edinburgh watching the fireworks, and it was at this point that I decided that this year was going to be my year of adventures and trying lots of new things.

My first new thing of 2014 was visiting Edinburgh, which is a beautiful city and is home of the best hot chocolate I have tasted! Thanks to Matt for introducing us to this as well as one of the best caramel chocolates I have ever tasted.

 We did all the traditional touristy things in Edinburgh such as visiting the castle and climbing Arthur's Seat.

Edinburgh Castle

Arthur's Seat

View of Edinburgh from the top of Arthur's Seat

 While in Edinburgh we also had 'our horizons broadened' - this was how Matt explained it to us afterwards. On our last night we were invited to a house party, which is fine except for the fact that it turned out no one actually knew the people whose house it was. We were told there would be live music at the house party, which raised all sorts of questions; but we decided to give it a go and go with the flow. The house party was lots of fun and everyone there was really nice, despite the fact we were complete strangers who had just wandered off of the street! The live music turned out to be a folk band who were brilliant. I def think I will be crashing more house parties in the future if they are that much fun!

 Another first, which my trip to Edinburgh provided was flying during a storm. I am not the best of flyers when the weather is calm, so you can imagine what I am like when the plane is swaying in the strong winds while sat at the end of the runway about to take off. We made it to London in one piece so all was ok in the end and no tranquilisers were required.


I didn't have that much time to get over the flight before I was back on a plane crossing the Atlantic towards New York for my brother's birthday. The trip was a surprise and some how we managed to get him through security and into departures without him finding out where we were actually going (we told him he was going to Madrid and this was only after we had driven him to the airport without him actually knowing we were going on holiday).

Aerial view of Newfoundland covered in snow

New York was brilliant and we managed to squeeze lots into just 3 days, including a trip to see the New York Knicks play the Phoenix Suns at Madison Square Gardens. We are massive sports fans in our family, but I have to admit we did not know much about basketball (although my brother will try to convince you that he knows lots). By the end of the game though we had caught on with most of the rules and were on our feet cheering on the Knicks to victory; I think we had been swayed massively by the massive canons that shoot t shirts into the crowd (you def don't get those at football matches, but if any chairman etc are reading this I think they would be a great addition to half time).

View from the top of the Empire State Building

I think I can speak for all of us that we had a great time watching basketball, it is definitely entertaining, although I still have trouble getting my head around the fact that 5 mins extra time can actually take almost 15 mins to play what with time outs etc.